Biography
Benjamin Ryan Tillman Jr., was born to parents of English descent—Sofia Ann Hancock and Benjamin Ryan Tillman, Sr. He was born on August 11, 1847 in the Edgefield District, near Trenton, South Carolina. From an early age young Ben showed a developed vocabulary and a strong literary interest. However, the coming of the Civil War, caused him to leave school at the age of seventeen in July 1864 to join the Confederate States Army. Six days after leaving school, however, as he was walking home after a three hour swim in a mill pond, Ben Tillman was attacked by violent pains in his left eye. He had developed an abscess in the left eye socket caused by bacteria and which eventually required removal of the left eye. Thus, he never fought for the Confederacy.
During Reconstruction, he became a paramilitary fighter in the struggle to overthrow the Republican coalition in the state. He was present at the Hamburg Massacre in July 1876, during which a federal militia was overthrown and its arms seized by a group of armed citizens led by Tillman's fellow "Red Shirts".
It was at the Hamburg Massacre of 1876, that Ben Tillman came of age. Stephen Kantrowitz writes in this biography of Tillman. As the commander of Edgefield County's Sweetwater Sabre Club, a paramilitary unit dedicated to terrorizing Republican officeholders in South Carolina, the 29-year-old Tillman, with his red-shirted troopers, participated in the Hamburg Riot on July 8, an occasion marked by the murder of a number of black militiamen who had conducted a celebratory parade through the mostly black town of Hamburg, South Carolina, four days earlier. As Tillman himself would later put it, "The leading white men of Edgefield" had decided "to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson" by "having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable." None of the perpetrators of the Hamburg murders were ever brought to justice.
Tillman's role in the Hamburg Riot established him as a leading figure in the white supremacist movement. His involvement, about which he boasted constantly in future years, was the cornerstone upon which he would build his political career, first as governor of South Carolina and then, for 24 years, as a United States senator.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin Tillman
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